Picasso up close and personal

As his biographer John Richardson unveils a show of the artist’s Mediterranean works, he recalls how the sun revived the maestro’s passions

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in Cannes (Rene Burri)
Feeling restless in Paris in the summer of 1946, Picasso had decided to head
for the south. With him was his young, bright, beautiful mistress, Françoise
Gilot. To Françoise’s dismay, he took her to stay in a house he had given
his previous mistress, Dora Maar, when they split up. Ménerbes is a
beautiful hilltop village to the east of Avignon, but Françoise hated it and
tried to run away. Fortunately, Marie Cuttoli, widow of an important
senator, and the woman who commissioned Picasso, Henri Matisse and many more
to design tapestries, invited them to stay in Antibes. Back on the
Mediterranean, Picasso took a new lease on life and rented rooms in
Golfe-Juan.

And then one day (where else but on the beach?), Picasso casually met some
people who suggested that he move to Vallauris — a pottery town that had
supplied the world with cooking utensils since Roman times